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About Looper Pedals

Looper pedals have become one of the most widely used types of modern pedal technology among guitarists. With a looper, a single guitarist can build up complicated, multi-tracked guitar parts by recording their playing over and over in real time. Looping time varies from pedal to pedal, as do operation and features. All, however, are characterized by the ability to record, overdub, start and stop your loops with just your foot.

Ed Sheeran, though not the first 'looper' by any means, did much to popularize the technique and since then, countless ambitious guitarists and songwriters have added looping devices to their pedal boards in an effort to unlock the power of looping in their own songs and soundscapes.

Many pedal manufacturers offer loopers. BOSS were first on the scene with their game-changing RC Loop Stations and the TC Electronic Ditto simplified the concept for casual loopers. Most multi effects pedals contain loopers too, often incorporating other switchable effects to vary the sonic possibilities on offer.

Visit any guitarguitar UK store and check out our comprehensive selection of loopers. Try them out in one of our soundproof booths, get our staff to show you how they work or just order directly from our website!

Frequently Asked Questions about Looper Pedals

Definitely! A looper will accept any audio source that can be plugged into it. Some loopers, such as the BOSS RC-30, also have a balanced XLR input for accepting a microphone. This opens the looper right up to be used with vocals or anything else you point the mic at! And remember, this is AS WELL AS the guitar (or keyboard, or bass) being plugged into the quarter inch jack input.
Your imagination is the limit of what these machines can achieve.

Yes, a significant number of them do! All of the bigger models including the Line 6 Pod HD500x and the Bodd GT1000 have a built-in looper but so do more affordable units such as the ZOOM G3XN. Looping technology has caught on so much now that everyone can enjoy it.

Single pedal loopers add functionality by introducing features that require double taps of the pedal or holding down the pedal with your foot for a second or two to engage secondary functions. This can take a little getting used to at first but the space you save on your pedalboard more than makes up for it...more room for fuzz pedals!

That's very much up to you. We recommend either right at the beginning or right at the end of your pedal chain but wherever you place it, you'll get different results.
Think about this: if the pedal is at the end of your chain, you can feed lots of different effects combinations into it and build up dense, colourful patterns of sound. The loops will remain unchanged, allowing you to create a loop of clean guitar, then overdub a distorted line, perhaps followed by one with distortion and flanger, and so on. This can all happen in real time of course. If you put your looper at the beginning of your chain, you are essentially giving it your 'dry' guitar sound which it is using to make the loop and then passing onto through the rest of the effects on your board. You can then use your other pedals to affect the sound of the loop in real time. The loop will, for example, only stay distorted as long as the distortion pedal is switched on. Turning off the distortion pedal will revert the looper to its original clean state.
Both ways are excellent fun...it is more a case of what you're trying to achieve! Some players actually use two separate loopers, one at the beginning and one at the end of their chain!

Well, the top end BOSS units (the RC-30 and the RC-300) have a huge 3 hours of looping time available, meaning they probably qualify for the longest looping time. However, to keep this in perspective: if you tend to use one or two loops per song, a 30 second loop played 6 or 7 times makes up the length of a whole song! If most band's sets take up half an hour, something like the TC Electornics' Ditto with it's relatively slight 5 minutes recording time is much more than you actually need!
We would recommend picking a looper based more on the features you need (storage space, FX, amount of pedals etc) rather than a specification regarding recording time.